A Cascade County district judge will decide in the coming weeks on issues in a case filed against a proposed anti-transgender bathroom initiative.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Montana sued the state of Montana and Secretary of State Corey Stapleton last October requesting an injunction to block CI-183 from going to the November 2018 ballot. The ballot proposal, created by the Montana Family Foundation, would require people to use the bathrooms for the gender on their birth certificate.

The injunction to block the ballot initiative from moving forward was filed in Cascade County District Court and arguments were heard Monday.

In December, attorneys for the state of Montana asked District Judge John Kutzman to dismiss the case because the ballot initiative had not yet been certified by signature-gatherers. The signatures have to be turned into county elections offices by June 22, and those offices will take four weeks to validate those signatures.

The ACLU challenged the motion, arguing the judge should not postpone an inevitable argument. Even if the judge dismisses this case because the initiative has not yet been certified, the ACLU would likely pursue the same case in the future if it did qualify for the ballot.

Additionally, ACLU legal director Alex Rate said the initiative was a "solution in search of a problem." Transgender individuals are already using the bathrooms associated with their gender identities today with no reported issues, he said. And for hypothetical criminal incidents the initiative seeks to address, there are already criminal statutes enacted to prosecute those cases.

The ACLU argues in their case against CI-183 that the initiative would deny people participation in public life where they are constitutionally guaranteed participation.

Mike Rausch, representing the Montana League of Cities and Towns, also made arguments Monday. The league has filed to intervene in support of the ACLU in the case, arguing the initiative as an "unfunded mandate" imposed on local municipalities.

As for the "too early to argue" debate, Rate said if a citizen group wanted to deny women's right to bear arms, or Native Americans' right to vote, the court would likely waste no time hearing a case on the issue's constitutionality.

Jon Bennion, chief deputy attorney general representing the state, however, argued that previous court rulings gave precedent that these cases should only be heard after the initiative had qualified for the ballot. If Kutzman were to allow the case to move forward, Bennion warned that would open the floodgates for litigation to kill all sorts of citizen-proposed ballot initiatives before they reach the signature-gathering stages.

"If there's one thing you should take away from this hearing, it's that the Supreme Court seems to have already spoken to this issue," he said.

And based on the number of proposed initiatives that had actually reached the signature count to qualify (27 percent since 2007, Bennion said), the state of Montana is not exceedingly confident this one will.

Jeff Laszloffy, president and CEO of the Montana Family Foundation, declined to say in an interview how many signatures the effort has gathered so far, saying most signatures come in toward the deadline.

"It's going well," he said. "We're not in the position yet to say we're going to get there but we are in a position to say we're working very hard to get there."

Laszloffy said he is confident Kutzman would rule in the state's favor to dismiss the case.

"The people of Montana deserve the right to vote on this," he said.

Kutzman said he wouldn't likely rule on the motion to dismiss the case by the end of this week, but asked attorneys to move forward with the discovery and deposition. If the case is dismissed and the ACLU files again after the ballot hypothetically qualifies, the time limit will be narrow for the case to play out before the November election.